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Election’s Eve: Our Roundup of Some of the Key Issues

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama on stage at the foreign policy presidential debate. October 22, 2012. Photo by Irina Lagunina, courtesy of Voice of America, PD.

Election’s Eve is finally upon us. Even after the longest presidential campaign in history, the two candidates and their running mates are scheduled to hold 14 events across eight states in the final hours. The current (as of 2 pm) Real Clear Politics average of twelve polls shows President Obama at 48.5 percent, with Mitt Romney closely following at 48.1 percent. Some have maintained this election is too close to call. Nate Silver puts the odds at 86 percent chance that President Obama will win the Electoral College. This morning, Larry Sabato and the Crystal Ball predicted that President Obama would likely win a second term. Here at Riding the Tiger, we aren’t the prediction business, but we have been following the election closely throughout year and weighing in with historical analysis and commentary. In this post, we highlight some of the more salient issues in the election, as well as some issues the candidates didn’t address but we wish they had.

This election was marked by unprecedented fundraising and campaign spending. As we noted in last week’s Friday Round-up, this election will likely cost $6 billion, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' new analysis of Federal Election Commission data. The 2012 election will be the most expensive election in American history, with the cost exceeding the next most expensive election by more than $700 million. Ray LaRaja posited on RTT that it could easily be argued that there is too little spent on elections, particularly if we consider the costs of informing and mobilizing voters. However, the Obama campaign amassed a base of more than 4 million unique donors — or 1 in 75 Americans – a new record. We also witnessed the emergence of a Super PAC political arms race. The Super PACs and campaigns have spent substantial sums of money on mostly negative ads in battleground states (87% of ads this election were negative, according to the Wesleyan Media Project). As we have argued previously on RTT, whether all the money raised and spent will make a difference in turning out voters is an entirely different question. Indeed, what will matter more is the ability of each of the candidates and their campaigns to organize and mobilize voters. In the final hours, Republicans are painting the picture that they carry the enthusiasm advantage that will help Get Out the Vote (GOTV) efforts in the final hours.

In “The Candidates Views on Energy,” we provided an overview of the key differences between the Republican and Democratic tickets over clean energy, climate policy, government regulation and the Keystone pipeline expansion.

In “Do the Candidates Really Want to Wake the Sleeping Issue of School Reform?,” Jesse Rhodes noted that neither Obama, nor Romney made much of education before the presidential debate on domestic policy even though it has been an area of major, albeit submerged, programmatic reform in 2012. Christopher P. Loss further noted the striking thing about contemporary education politics is just how much agreement there is among policymakers and the public that the education system is broken and needs to be fixed.